Twitter, a service that lets users spurt 140-character messages into cyberspace, is popular with young people, but it has been better known for posts about reality TV show stars' restaurant choices than for serious information about financial services.

But insurers and producers have discovered that the employed young consumers who use Twitter tend to be more interested in the concept of protecting their income against illness or injury than they are to have income protection.

Dressner is hoping the Twitter-friendly disability information chunks he has posted on the LIFE site will give the agents, brokers, insurance company staffers and others participating in LIFE's Disability Insurance Awareness Month campaign a simple way to increase awareness.

The campaign started Tuesday.

One of the tweets is, More than three-fourths of Americans believe most people need life insurance. Are your loved ones protected? http://bit.ly/tzTqa4

Another is, Nearly half of people who need life insurance say they haven’t bought it because they haven’t got around to it. Oy! http://bit.ly/JrrCGB

Marketers at the MetLife unit of MetLife Inc., New York (NYSE:MET), noted earlier this week that about two-thirds of the workers in the "Millennial generation," or "Generation Y," report being very concerned about what would happen to their households' financial security if the principle wage earners became disabled.

About half of those Generation Y workers -- workers ages 32 and younger -- are living paycheck to paycheck, and only about half think that they have any disability insurance, the marketers report.

The situation could be even more dire than the young workers realize: Marketers have found when they've run similar surveys that many workers who believe they have disability insurance don't.